Tag Archives: orpheus larp

As I’ve intimated in various places at various times, I’m kinda working on a LRP project separate from No Rest for the Wicked, Inquisition Chronicles and indeed the entire Warhammer 40,000 franchise. I have a partner-in-crime on this, but we’ve not been able to sit down and discuss what we want to do with it due to running the last No Rest event, and other things getting in the way. So that’s on the back burner for now. It might be the awesome collision of Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, and Firefly in one new IP, or it might not. We haven’t even gotten that far, though I do love the idea of making an Outlaw Star LRP.

Something else that’s come up is the idea of a new parlour LRP[1]. This game would be something different from any other LRP (or LARP)[2] I’ve run: rather than putting people into a situation and then either having them work with the situation or go off on linears (or both), the idea would be that the live part of the game would be social with missions happening outside of game-time. Let me explain.

For this concept, we’d be looking at something like SLA Industries, Shadowrun, Orpheus, Demon Hunters, or Bounty Hunter Bebop – a game where you gather a team and go run missions for prestige, money, some other prize, or all three. The pub part would be a gathering of people able to go on these missions – bounty hunters, shadowrunners, mercenaries, etc – who grab a mission off the board, put together a team for it, then go back to drinking to “prepare”. Missions would then be run between games as tabletop sessions, and there’d be a leaderboard of some kind indicating which characters were top-ranked. The general idea would be that you’d have to weigh up the balance between taking the A-listers on your missions (which makes them more likely to succeed) versus increasing your own lead on them (as if they’re with you, they gain the same rank boost you do from the mission). There’d be some kind of meta-plot behind some of the missions, and we’d generally try to make the scene interesting, but the general obvious part of the game would be about the rankings and taking missions to get money, fame, and glory.

There wouldn’t be any downtime system – just up-time politics and the missions between games.

Curious as to what people think of the idea. I’ve probably not explained it well, but I think it has legs.

I’m working on a conversion of the Orpheus RPG by White Wolf to a simplified LARP format.

The reason I’m doing this is because (a) I love Orpheus, and (b) I don’t want to have to have people rolling dice or using another type of randomiser to resolve things in game. I want people to just be able to do things.

The problem with this is coming up with a balance factor. I haven’t decided whether I want to go for a contact system or not, and I don’t know how well what I’m working on is going to work.

Currently, I’m looking at having skills (abilities) that enable you to do a thing rather than being levelled and dropping attributes entirely. So Brawl gives you the ability to strike effectually in unarmed combat, and Melee lets you do the same with knives, while Dodge lets you avoid some strikes.

I’m trying to draw on the source material as much as possible – using the set rules rather than making my own where I can, but I don’t know if I shouldn’t just be trying to create a new system whole-cloth or just running it as if it were a tabletop system with acting the same way the Isles of Darkness do.